Disgrace

JM Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel followed a Cape Town lecturer's fall from grace after an affair with a mixed-race student. Excoriating and raw, it dissected white guilt and masculinity in the throes of midlife crisis with scalpel precision. This handsome adaptation mitigates little of the horror, with John Malkovich giving a blistering performance as tragic antihero David Lurie. Sacked from his post, Lurie travels into the bush to join his daughter (Jessica Haines) on her remote farm. What follows next - land seizures, rape, violence and victimhood - uncoils with tragic inevitability and pushes Lurie to confront his own moral bankruptcy. Superbly handled by director Steve Jacobs and strikingly shot on location in the Cederburg wilderness, Disgrace is riveting and harrowing viewing: an allegory of post-apartheid South Africa's struggle to deal with its own traumatic history.